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February 29 movie: The Cowboy and the Lady. Stars Gary Cooper as, let's see, a cowboy. And Merle Oberon as ... a lady! What do you know! Oberon, tired of being the poor little rich girl, pretends to be her own maid. Then falls for Cooper and finds she can't extricate herself from the lie without losing him. I feel like I've seen this plot in a dozen movies, and this may be the best one. I loved this movie! Gary Cooper is beyond adorable as a shy cowboy in love for the first time. There's a scene where he's "playing house," pretending she's there and showing her around the half-finished house he's building for her, that is soooo sweet. I also liked Patsy Kelly as the real maid who helps Oberon go slumming, Harry Davenport as Oberon's cool uncle, and Walter Brennan as another cowboy.

February 28 movie: Hide-out. Robert Montgomery plays a womanizing gangster who hides out at a farm in Connecticut. The farming family, not knowing what he is, take him in and accept him. Especially the cute farmer's daughter, Maureen O'Sullivan. This being a Robert Montgomery movie, it's a bit moralistic at the end. Still, I love Montgomery and I loved this movie. The scenes where he tries to learn how to feed chickens are hilarious. Also features Edward Arnold as the cop trying to bring in him, and Mickey Rooney as the sickeningly cute little boy. Did he ever play anything else?

February 26 movie: There Goes My Heart. Stars Virginia Bruce as the spoiled heiress who runs away from her gruff but beloved male guardian, and Fredric March, the street-smart reporter who desperately needs a hit story. He tries to make his career back with a scoop about her, but falls in love with her instead. Sound familiar? That's right, It Happened One Night! Yes, the plot of There Goes My Heart is a total ripoff of It Happened One Night. What saves this movie is the sparkling chemistry between March and Bruce. Also great supporting work by Patsy Kelly, Eugene Pallette, and especially Alan Mowbray as a would-be chiropractor taking correspondence lessons.

February 26 movie: The Ascent of Man. Parts 3-5 of Dr. Bronowski's science series. "The Grain in the Stone" talked about the history of agriculture. "The Hidden Structure" addressed stone masonry and architecture, specifically the invention and development of the arch. "Music of the Spheres" dealt with mathematics and metallurgy. Those brief descriptions make it sound dry, which really isn't fair at all. It's really a vibrant series, full of Dr. Bronowski's joy in knowledge.

"Music of the Spheres" includes an image I remember from when I first saw this series as a kid: a Japanese swordsman chopping a sheaf of straw in half. The first time around I did not remember Dr. Bronowski drily explaining that the cut is one of the classic ways to slice through a human body, but they use straw for practice "nowadays."

For some reason the DVD runs with the subtitles turned on by default, and I've been leaving them on out of inertia. There are some funny flubs in the subtitles, such as "here outside the minister" instead of "outside the minster." I think the best subtitle flub was "The astrolabe was the wristwatch and slide door [slide rule] of its time."

I forgot to mention, in the episode about metallurgy Dr. Bronowski gives a wonderful definition of scientific inquiry: "Ask an impertinent question and you're on the way to a pertinent answer."

February 24 movie: Bachelor Mother. A fun screwball comedy starring Ginger Rogers as a single salesgirl who finds a baby on her doorstep, and David Niven as her boss. Everyone assumes the baby is Ginger's, and hilarity ensues.

February 23 movie: The Matrix. I think one of the great shames of the movies in recent decades is that the two Matrix sequels were so bad, they made me forget how good the original was. Which was, in fact, a terrific movie. So good that I watched it on AMC. With commercials!

The first time I saw this movie I had no idea going in what the Matrix was. None at all, and I was on the edge of my seat at the big reveal. How did I manage to get through all the pre-movie advertising without finding that out? It makes me wonder: how much better would, say, Terminator 2 have been if the advertising hadn't so thoroughly spoiled the movie.

February 23 movie: Notorious. Here's another movie I can't resist. They were showing Hitchcock all day on TCM. Unfortunately I had to work, but at least I got to see this one.

February 22 movie: The Talk of the Town. This was a delightful movie. Cary Grant plays an anarchist agitator falsely accused of arson & murder, who hides out with Jean Arthur and her unwitting tenant, a constitutional law scholar (Ronald Colman). Sounds grim, but that's only if it had starred Humphrey Bogart. This way it's a funny screwball comedy that was also thoughtful and dare I say it, intellectual.

February 21 movie: Stalag 17. Once again, I cannot miss an opportunity to watch this movie.

February 19 movie: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Eh, my opinion of this movie is about the same as last time. A few fantastic set pieces, a hopeless muddle of a movie. Basically a fun way to kill an evening.

February 16 movie: Persepolis. Wow. What a terrific movie. At times harrowing, at times funny, always gripping. The art style really let the story shine through. I'd like to read the comic it was based on, though I heard it was a fast read. I wonder if she's written further comics that continue the story after the movie.

Wow, it's been a long time since I wrote up a movie. I didn't watch that many in February, but I still have a fair amount of catching up to do. So let's go!

We thought this was going to be purely a collection of song clips, like the Nat King Cole movie we watched recently. Instead it was a documentary mixing songs with interviews with Clooney's relatives. Personally I could have done with more music and less talking. Though there were some good stories, particularly Miguel Ferrer talking about her conflicts with Mitch Miller.

February 4 movie: The Ascent of Man. This isn't technically a movie but I'm writing it up because I'm so glad Netflix has it and I'm enjoying it so much. It's an early 1970s BBC science series by Jacob Bronowski, aka Dr. Bloody Bronowski. Among my earliest memories are watching The Ascent of Man with my dad. Tonight I watched the first two episodes, "Lower than the Angels" which deals with human evolution, specifically the evolution of the head, and "Harvest of the Seasons" which addresses the agricultural revolution. I appreciate how Bronowski mixes the science with personal stories. For example in the first episode he describes being asked to do a mathematical analysis of the shape of Australopithecus' teeth. It makes it all seem so much more vivid.

February 2 movie: Pirates of the Caribbean. I enjoyed this immensely, even though I totally called the ending. I thought it would be a sequel rather than a credit cookie, but I called it.

January 31 movie: Sampson and Delilah. This is the second best Biblical epic about hair. The best Biblical epic about hair is, of course, Sodom and Gomorrah starring Stewart Granger's pompadour. But this one has Hedy Lamarr! And Victor Mature wrestling a lion! And George Sanders and Angela Lansbury too.

January 27 movie: Four Sisters. This is the original movie of which Young at Heart was a remake. Starred John Garfield instead of Frank Sinatra, Claude Rains as the dad, and three real sisters as three of the four sisters. Like I said the premise -- adult daughters who do nothing all day but stand around waiting for papa to come home -- makes a little more sense in the 30s than in the 50s. Robert Osborne said this movie set Garfield on the path to fame playing bitter outsiders. Which he did many many times.

January 26 movie: Young at Heart. Frank Sinatra and Doris Day isn't the weirdest romantic pairing I've ever seen, but it's close. This is a strange movie, largely (I think) because it's based on an older movie and the premise -- three adult daughters who live at home and apparently have no jobs, no hobbies, no friends, nothing to do but stand around looking pretty -- seems rooted in an earlier time, nonsensical in Technicolor. As Georg pointed out, the strangest thing about the movie is that not one character is actually young at heart. Everyone seems weary and embittered beyond their years. Except Alan Hale Jr. who plays the boyfriend of one of Doris Day's sisters. He's pretty lighthearted throughout the movie. I'm a huge fan of Alan Hale Sr. so it was fun to see his son (the Skipper) in a movie. Great music too, many good songs by Sinatra.